Floppy Disk Drive... redundant?

WingZero30

WingZero30

WingZero30

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Apology if similar issue has been posted before but I was wondering if FDD has been outdated now and superseded by USB flash drive etc. I don't have it now in my first build either and don't hear any mention of it anymore. Back in the old days it used to be such a rage and I bought so many floppy disks.
 
I only use them on very old machines. I've got a floppy disk that contails dos runable programs like fdisk and command prompt. Stopped using them for my use years and years ago.
 
The only downside about the demise of the floppy drive is that nothing has replaced it for sheer simplicity when it comes to boot disks.
 
Not if you ask my granddad. He has a floppy disc camera! It is massive, he took a big pile of them into Boots a few weeks ago to get some photos printed and when he found out they couldn't print them for him he was extremly baffled as to why no shops could do floppy disc prints.

The whole idea of floppy discs is news to him! A few long hours and a fortune in ink and photo paper later I got them all printed!
 
Gundog48 said:
Not if you ask my granddad. He has a floppy disc camera! It is massive, he took a big pile of them into Boots a few weeks ago to get some photos printed and when he found out they couldn't print them for him he was extremly baffled as to why no shops could do floppy disc prints.

The whole idea of floppy discs is news to him! A few long hours and a fortune in ink and photo paper later I got them all printed!
Click to expand...

Nerd grammar nazism strikes again. They're disks, not discs. Discs literally refer to the round shape of objects, disks is short for diskettes.

Thank you for listening :P.
 
Still got one installed in my PC and a spare drive on the shelf, got boxes of nearly new disks as well. I don't use them much at all, except I have a dell D610 laptop with a msdos 5 operating system (dual boot with XP) and occasionally play old games and stuff downloaded from the net.
 
Must be 6-7 years since I've used one, been using flash drives pretty much since release. Booting from floppys was so much simpler however its nice that microsoft provide a utility for making a bootable win 7 flash drive and the creators of unetbootin for all sorts of linux distros
 
Haven't needed to use one for a long time but when my new machine was built for me 3 years back with all the latest types of connections I decided to have a new 'Floppy' fitted just in case. It's disabled in B.I.O.S so no checking on boot but it's there if I need it. :)
 
I haven't had a floppy for years probably about 5, I dont even have a floppy or an IDE connection anymore, I remember when floppys took over from tape in the home computer world and at the time I was amazed by the technology.
 
davieg said:
Wasnt it announced that they were stopping making the discs a few months back, seem to remember it somewhere.

Dave
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IIRC the main manufacturers have stopped making them, but I think either a couple of minor/specialist manufacturers have bought some of the equipment or are still making them.

The mass market for the disks has died out (finally), but they are still in fairly heavy use with specialist equipment that would be very expensive to replace or upgrade so there is still a small market (IIRC a lot of things like weaving machines, semi automated sewing machines, standalone vinyl cutters, cnc etc use floppy disks for the patterns and some of them cost £10k-100k+ so will not be replaced just because the floppy is dying out).

I don't think i've used one in about 5 years, but I still have one in a couple of my machines (disconnected), and a bunch of old disks.
 
I still use mine for transfer of letters and mail from my work system to my home system, it saves me having to burn a disc every time.
 
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